From overflowing email inboxes to DNA analysis, people are often budding up against massive amounts of data. As this data streams into the lives of consumers, researchers, and big business, designers are often at a loss when it comes to making these systems manageable, not to mention usable.

When dealing with ever-increasing amounts of information, the following tasks can become incredibly inefficient: content creation, information retrieval, information organization, and maintaining information. Techniques such as distributed computing, information augmentation, and contextual awareness play a large role in building usable human/computer interfaces. This presentation will cover these proven design techniques and more, showcasing a great number of true-life examples to demonstrate their implementation and success. Attendees will receive a variety of actionable tips and ideas they can use when they return home.

Dustin Kirk

Neustar

Dustin Kirk is a Senior User Experience Designer at Neustar in the Webmetrics product group. His passion lies in changing the world’s perception of technology by raising people’s expectations through areas of interaction design & visualization. As a multi-disciplinary user experience designer, his scholastic research and professional focus is on creating systems and electronic interfaces that are both effective an efficient. He is particularly interested in improving users’ experiences through data-mining and context awareness. Having dual majored in Computer Science and Psychology, Dustin brings a breadth of knowledge in people and technology as well as a passion for business, design, and innovation. He has also completed a M.S. in Human Computer Interaction from Rensselaer and participated in the Entrepreneurship Development Program at MIT. As an advocate of simplicity and usability he has worked on many projects over the years to design and develop more efficient and effective systems, including Meeting Processes & Collaboration, Contact Management, Online Health Benefit Management, RSS Aggregation, and Mobile Applications. Dustin is now spreading his knowledge and experience by mentoring others and evangelizing user experience design to those in other fields.

Comments

This session presented a fairly limited contrast and comparison of some UI designs in some popular applications. It was adequate as a short primer on why implementation A was better than implementation B, but often the difference was fairly obvious. I would have liked to see more design principles emphasized that would help generalize to UI designs in new areas rather than just contrast and compare of some of the well-worn existing paradigms.